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Alumni Gallery: Aimee Koran '13
On view in the Alumni Gallery July 25 – September 12, 2026 Join us for the closing reception on Thursday, September 10 from 5 - 7 p.m.
Aimee Koran ’13 presents Union Hall: Maternal Order of Makers (M.O.M.), a project that temporarily transforms our alumni gallery into the headquarters of a labor union for mothers. Part union hall, part workshop, part archive, and part organizing space, the exhibition imagines Koran’s caregiving union—one that is dedicated to the recognition of maternal labor as essential work worthy of visibility, solidarity, and collective power.
Artist Statement At the heart of the project is the conviction that all mothers are makers. Whether making paintings or packed lunches, businesses or bedtime routines, sculptures or sandwiches, communities or cherished memories, mothers perform acts of creation that sustain families, economies, and culture. Yet these forms of labor remain largely invisible, uncompensated, and excluded from many of the structures that protect other workers.
Rather than presenting motherhood as a private identity or personal experience, Union Hall reframes it as collective infrastructure: a form of labor that quietly underpins every institution while rarely receiving the protections, visibility, or value it deserves.
At this moment of national reflection, Union Hall asks visitors to reconsider the stories America tells about work, freedom, and who builds the nation. Two hundred and fifty years after the country's founding, the exhibition proposes an expanded vision of patriotism—one rooted not only in independence, but in interdependence; not only in individual achievement, but in collective care. It imagines what becomes possible when the labor of making and mothering is recognized not as private sacrifice, but as public work worthy of organization, dignity, and Power.
About the Artist Aimee Koran is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Philadelphia, PA. She holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA in Fine Arts with a minor in Textile Design from Moore College of Art & Design. Koran explores the topic of motherhood, focusing on the continuously shifting and complex binaries that shape the role.
Image courtesy of the artist.
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